The Evolutionary Roots of Democracy

Politics—if you want a word that is charged in all kinds of ways, this is a good candidate. People get fired up about all kinds of politics—large-scale politics (Can you believe that the UN is not stepping in?), mid-scale politics (Is the state really going to cap local school budgets—is that even legal?!), small-scale politics (There is no way I’m going to vote for that guy for the PTA board!), to very-small-scale politics (Sally obviously didn’t get the manager position over Ted because Ted is the owner’s nephew!). Politics!

In recent years, some great work from good old evolutionary psychology has shed some extraordinary light onto the nature of politics. While there are many great examples, one of the most interesting and exciting developments in this area relates to the work of Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza (2009), who make a great case for humans as the democratic ape. And as you’ll see, their general idea has tremendous implications for understanding who we are.

To best understand our political nature, Bingham and Souza argue, we need to think of humans as being able to project significant threat to others in a real and coordinated fashion. They call this the principle of coercive threat, and they argue that our ability to pose coercive threat to other humans is unlike anything that’s ever existed in any other species. In short, they argue that humans evolved to be accurate and deadly in their throwing ability. We can throw rocks with much more deliberation, speed, and accuracy than can any other animal. By far.

Sound simple? Perhaps. But think about this. Imagine an ancestral group of hominids with a powerful but unfair and selfish leader who happens to also be bigger and stronger than any of the others in the group (which is how he got this leadership position in the first place). Attacking him physically would be risky; he can punch harder than you can—remember, he is big and strong. But throwing a rock—well that can smart a bit—doesn’t have the same potential costs as close-up physical confrontation. In fact, thrown just right, a rock can kill someone. But the cost to the thrower is, again, small in terms of time and energy.

When humans first evolved the ability to accurately throw projectiles in this way, they gained the ability to hold coercive threat over others in an evolutionarily unprecedented manner. Couple this with another aspect of humans that is clearly part of our evolutionary story—the forming of social alliances. Humans are clearly social beings and we often form alliances with others beyond kin lines (in other words, we form strong alliances and friendships with non-relatives). So now imagine a group of three or four males who are smaller than the leader but who form a group, with a vision, of creating a clan (or society) that affords them and their families more in the way of power and resources. This small group can be powerful. With shared vision and the ability to accurately throw from a distance, a small group can, in fact, be more powerful than a single large leader.

The ability to emit coercive threat from a distance coupled with the proclivity to form significant social alliances may well have given rise to the nature of politics in human groups. In such a scenario, the social playing field can be leveled, and both egalitarianism and democracy can emerge. Our natural tendency, then, may well be democracy. Can the evolutionary approach help us understand the roots of human politics? I think so.

While most often the accusations of "reductionism" are wrong in many ways, I think this is too reductionist and may indeed make one grow a beard and light a pipe and mumble "just so."

Chimps form just this kind of male alliance and yet they do not have groups defined by culture or any kind of Democracy. There is something more going on. First, hidden estrus is a huge generally ignored factor. This makes the cost of trying to monopolize mating opportunities, the point of being a dominant male, far higher since vigilance must be constant instead of for a few days every month. It also lowers the rewards, since more females will manage to sneak off. Then add in the ability to not just throw stones, but to make stones sharp. Now even a weak male alone who surprises the dominant male can kill them. So the risks of being dominant rise considerably. Now throw in the benefits of increased group size in competition with other groups, which seems to have selected for culturally defined groups, use of language, bonding not based on kinship, conformity, and so on. All good but if a group has 150 members instead of 40, there are many more strong males hoping to become the dominant and many more alliances seeking to dominate. The amount of internal violence would be too high, too destructive. A group that had less internal discord among the most fit males would be stronger when facing an external foe. And if the new dominants still went around killing all the infants in a group where dominance changed hands as frequently as it might in a group of 150, reproduction in the group could rapidly reach zero.

It all adds up: far lower benefits for dominance and far higher costs for dominance, less ability to dominate and more ability to thwart domination. The group that solved this by enforcing egalitarianism, as we believe our ancestors did( see Boehm, "Hierarchy in the Forest") would have a huge advantage.

I seriously doubt the noble savages had the abstraction known as democracy. I don't see exactly where/how this enters into the scenario. Warring gangs sounds more like what you've described.

Maybe alliances would allow these to sometimes gang together into an even bigger and better gang, but one could easily argue that factionalism always is breaking such groups apart at least as fast as they're being formed. Entropy wins in the end.

The only quasi-stable configuration is a gang of gangs reaches the 50%+1 threshold, then their mob bosses and tyrants can overpower, oppress, and enslave the other 50%-1, which is pretty much what "democracy" boils down to is practice.